The western population lobby is reluctant to condemn China’s brutal and repressive birth control program for one critical reason: it works.

So concludes China scholar John S. Aird in The slaughter of the Innocents: Coercive Birth Control in China, a painstaking and definitive history of Communist China’s inhuman experiment in social engineering.

Working with other China watchers, Mr. Aird has assembled irrefutable evidence that the Chinese government’s birth reduction program is a gross violation of the basic human right to freedom of reproduction.

Programs financed and executed by the West’s birth control in India, in the Middle East, and in Africa have been colossal failures.  The only ‘success’ story is China. Where the birth rate has plunged over the last ten years.

China’s dictatorship, building on the authoritarian and collectivist history of Chinese culture, has taken the coercive principle built into birth control to its logical conclusion, Mr. Aird argues.

Presented with its only major ‘success’ in birth reduction, it is not surprising, therefore, to see Western birth control lobby continue to lend both financial and moral support to the Chinese government.

For example, in 1983, when the Chinese birth control policy was at its coercive worst, a U.N. committee on which the late Rafael Salas, then Executive Director of UNFPA (United Nations Fund for Population Activities) served as an advisor, gave a UN population aware to Qian Xinzhong, the Minister-in-Charge of the State Family Planning Commission (SFPC) who directed the implementation of the coercive measures.

So far, only China has been willing to jettison the “basic human right of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number and spacing of their children” as proposed by World Population Plan of Action, 1974, Bucharest.  Birth planners in the West, Mr. Aird explains, “Sided with a brutally repressive regime against its people because it implemented their agenda.”

The terrifying lesson for the rest of the world is that contempt for human dignity and human rights may be the obligatory step in any ‘successful’ plan for birth reduction.

The Slaughter of the Innocents: Coercive Birth Control in China, by John S. Aird is available from AEI Press, American Enterprise Institute, 1150 17th St. N. W., Washington, D.C. 20036